Call for Papers

The growing popularity of portable computing devices such as smartphones and tablets have promoted the digital medium to be an important partner of everybody’s day life. In addition, the increasing amount of information available on the Web leads to the need of finding new solutions that ease the availability and the use of such information. An important feature toward this goal is the personalization of information presented to users according to their interests.

Tourism will benefit a lot from this scenario. Novel platforms can be seen, in fact, as a new mean enabling new experiences for tourists visiting a city. Recommender systems, interactive guides, and augmented reality platforms are well-established examples of applications designed for tourism.

The workshop will focus on advances in systems and techniques enabling tourism facilities. The workshop is co-located with the 2012 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI 2012). It will be held the December 4th, 2012 in Macau, China. It would be an interactive forum for researchers ranging from data mining, information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning to interface engineering to discuss common problems and to identify new solutions of this emerging scenario.

The workshop aims at providing discussion and promote research and development on three main themes:

Models and Techniques for Tourist Facilities: How to analyze/model/predict how users visit a city? How to exploit these findings to drive tourists within a city? How to model/simulate tourists visiting and making use of a city? How to design tools to analyze and discover flows of tourists within the city?

Evaluation and Test Collections: How to evaluate tourist systems performance (both in terms of effectiveness and efficiency)? How to collect datasets of tourists behavior both from social platforms and from real-life scenarios? How to design and perform user studies to reveal tourists’ movements within a city?

User Interaction and Interfaces: How to design new ways to modify and to drive the tourist interaction within a city (e.g., advertisement, promotion of personalized cultural contents, etc.)?

We encourage interested researchers to submit their research, position, and demo papers. All submissions should be limited to a maximum of 5 pages in the IEEE 2-column format (download the LaTeX template here), and will be peer reviewed by at least 3 program committee members on the basis of technical quality, relevance, originality, significance, and clarity. At least one author of an accepted paper should attend the workshop to present it and actively participate to the event. The accepted papers will be included in the Workshop Proceedings published by the IEEE Computer Society Press. The workshop only accepts online submissions. Workshops online submission page can be accessed through the WI-IAT 2012 submission site (here).